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What a mess it was out there this weekend. Constant rain with temps not getting about 45 makes for a fairly miserable experience. Thankfully Miles really really likes to get wet and dirty! Unlike the last trial we did in the rain, Miles was much more in control of himself. I’m truly amazed at how well he ran this weekend especially considering I was moving fairly slowly due to the dubious footing in the ring. That being said, he had no problem running ahead of me which is something he never used to do…he’d just plod along beside me. I really tried to handle him as I do in practice with a lot more distance between us. He really shined this weekend in my mind. Here’s how we did…

Saturday:

Entered Novice Jumpers, Novice Chances, and two Novice Regular rounds. We haven’t been Q’ing very long in NADAC mostly because of Miles’ stressy history, but also because I don’t travel for NADAC (well except for once last fall). Admittedly I’m not the hugest NADAC fan, but it is fun to have really open courses and this trial was a fund raiser for canine cancer research. Anyway, we had a great run going in Jumpers until I pushed around a jump which led to him back jumping it before finishing up strong. I must defend that occurence because I was definitely pushing him and didn’t wait for him to commit to that jump before leaving him. We still pulled off a pretty good time at 4.54yps , but no Q.

Our Chances run was great except for me stepping over the line twice (this is becoming a very bad trend for me) and we had a bar down. Not sure what caused that as Miles rarely ever knocks bars. He may have been eyeing the large umbrella over the ring crew or he just lost his footing. I need to watch it again to see. Can anyone help me?

Thankfully we pulled off two really nice Q’s in Novice Regular to finish up our title and move up to Open for Sunday. Of course in NADAC they also have these things called “hoops” that dogs run through–I guess they feel they need to make new obstacles since they’ve removed so many! I didn’t think that hoops ever migrated into the main types of classes…I thought they were only in the games classes. Not so much, we had 4 hoops in each of the Regular rounds. Miles has never seen a hoop, so it was questionable what he’d do with it. Fortunately they had one in the warm up area so I shaped him to offer running through it in between runs early in the day. At first he was freaked out by it (new things are very scary right?), but pretty quickly he was perfectly comfortable going through it with many different handling patterns. We finished in 4yps for round 1 and 4.84yps for round 2. Here are the runs, the first one is a mess when I uploaded it…why this happens I don’t know:

Sunday:

We were entered in the same runs as yesterday except we moved up to Open Regular. The ring was in even worse shape today since the rain never let up all night. Jumpers was first and we burned it up with a smokin’ 5.4yps Q and 1st place.

Novice Chances was a pretty easy course without any real tricks. I was proud of me being able to push him out to the tunnel discrimination in the beginning and getting in the front cross before the “gamble portion”. Not to go without mention, Miles had no problem sending out to the dogwalk..yeah! Further, I DIDN’T STEP ON THE LINE!! Woohoooooo, our first Chances Q. Oh and I love how he’s bucking to go at the beginning…just really fired up to run 😀

Next was our first attempt at Open Regular. The course was definitely tougher than any other we’d run in NADAC to date. There was a tunnel-dogwalk discrimination that we had to do the tunnel first and the dogwalk the second time. Somehow I lost him to a rear before heading to the weaves, but he recovered amazingly well. He even single-stepped most of the weaves! We got a Q and a 1st place at 4yps. The local news had arrived just before we ran this course and Mr. Miles’ run got taped!!

Since there were only 4 dogs in both Regular rounds it was pretty quick before we were walking the next course. Miles was the first dog to run, so I didn’t take much time to walk before I went back to the car to get him. I was nervous that I was going to forget a certain part and to my surprise, I nailed that part…but got lost elsewhere, ha! I’ve never lost my place before, so this was an interesting experience. Miles is such a fogiving guy that he put up with my ineptness and turned in a respectable run. We had a bar down that the judge didn’t call…don’t know if she didn’t see it or if she was just being nice because of the rain. This was his second bar this weekend, but this time he definitely was looking at the darn umpbrella!

That’s all folks! We travel locally for AKC next weekend, then have a much deserved weekend off. I’d love to go down to Charlotte to watch AKC Nationals that weekend, but I’m not sure if I’ll be up for it!